BrowseGoods (currently in beta) is a new visual search engine for shopping. It aims to help shoppers quickly visually scan through large numbers of items rather than by paging through endless text-heavy lists of search results.

The UI will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps, with the familiar pan & zoom functionality (and UI widgets), and also to anyone who’s read Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface. After a quick intro screen, you start by selecting a department (currently they have shoes, toys, watches, and sports), after which you’re shown a high-level overview of all the products in that department. From there, you can click on a product category to zoom closer.

Unfortunately, the farther out you’re zoomed, the worse the 2D Map UI metaphor works — the products are organized into myriad boxes & sub-boxes that are actually more difficult to scan than a simple list or hierarchical list. However, once you zoom in, the UI begins to shine, allowing you to quickly scan through hundreds of similar products.

I can definitely imagine myself using this service to browse for certain types of products (furniture, shirts, shoes, and posters, for instance) where there’s a lot of variety to sort through, but I wish there was a better way to drill down to a particular product category before beginning the visual browsing.

BrowseGoods is a very challenging product — it’s definitely not easy to come up with a workable taxonomy for such disparate products and to arrange them all in a logical fashion on a two-dimensional plane, nor is it easy to provide a simple and clean UI to navigate such a space. I think BrowseGoods is off to a good start, and I admire their ambition. It will be interesting to see how this site competes with like.com. I think I’ll have to write a comparison soon…